I dunno about this Euphues.
Lyly’s language is gorgeous,
of course, occasionally irritating,
too, so you feel satisfied
to have the experience just
behind you. you get up and go outside
and have a hot dog in the sunlight and
think about the conjunctions,
those pinions
that allow our sentences to rotate in mid-course:
“The afternoon was mild, although not yet over,”
placing the dependent clause in direct opposition
to the main clause, like a woman who suddenly
turns to face you and it takes
your breath away—there is a moment
of silence and intensity—the boats
are frozen on the bay and no little doggie barks.
“I’ve been meaning to say something to you . . .”
she begins. And your heart
sinks: something massive
is about to happen,
you will be joined to this woman
with a tremendous force, something like
gravity, in which
hats float down onto our heads and we smile.
Aisha Sabatini Sloan
Episode 22: “Form and Formlessness”
In an essay specially commissioned for the podcast, Aisha Sabatini Sloan describes rambling around Paris with her father, Lester Sloan, a longtime staff photographer for Newsweek, and a glamorous woman who befriends them. In an excerpt from The Art of Fiction no. 246, Rachel Cusk and Sheila Heti discuss how writing her first novel helped Cusk discover her “shape or identity or essence.” Next, Allan Gurganus’s reading of his story “It Had Wings,” about an arthritic woman who finds a fallen angel in her backyard, is interspersed with a version of the story rendered as a one-woman opera by the composer Bruce Saylor. The episode closes with “Dear Someone,” a poem by Deborah Landau.
Rachel Cusk photo courtesy the author.
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